"Pinkos See Red in Zebra Tale", by Cathy Young

[Shadowen]

"The notion of left-wing political bias in the universities is widely pooh-poohed on the left as so much right-wing propaganda—a smokescreen for an attempt to push a conservative agenda on college campuses. Sure, conservative professors may be a rare breed; but that, we are told, is only because the academy is all about intellectual openness, tolerance of disagreement, robust and untrammeled debate, and all those other intrinsically liberal values that conservatives presumably just don't get."

snip

http://www.reason.com/cy/cy050305.shtml">Article finished here

I must admit that a part of me agrees with a part of her article. But she takes a quadratic equation with two variables--2 + 3 + x = y--and assumes that y is a certain value, so x must be a certain value.

That is, she says that liberal professors admit conservatives are rare on university campuses, so if a conservative professor manages to piss a group of professors people off, accidentally or deliberately, it must be because those people are liberal.

In this case, I think it was a double case of mangled context. First, I'll bet that no one there bothered to check the original document; they just heard the Bean had done something "racist", and so piled on the bandwagon. Second, Young heard the story, look at the surface, and jumped to a conclusion.

Saying that what Bean did is "racist"--apparently because he showed evidence that not just white people can be bigots--isn't "liberal". It's "stupid".